It’s not because they think the business plans are the best tool for building a business.
We asked the Teaching Entrepreneurship community what tools they teach and many of the instructors we surveyed teach business plans because it’s a course requirement or because they believe it’s “standard practice” outside academia.
Our research appears to contradict the notion that business plans are standard practice as a majority (57%) of instructors outside academia don’t teach business plans at all.
In fact, across the nearly 300 instructors we surveyed, only 8% teach the business plan exclusively.
Compare that to the 88% of instructors who teach one of the “canvases” (e.g. Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas, and/or Value Proposition Canvas) and it’s clear business plans are no longer the de facto standard.
Why Do Teachers Love the Business Plan?
The few respondents teaching only the business plan cited many reasons for preferring this tool. The most commons reasons are:
It is a comprehensive tool
It is necessary for some funding sources like bank loans
It is required by standards in the respondent’s particular context
But the vast majority of teachers don’t feel that way – across all teacher populations we surveyed (K-12 and higher ed, academic and non-academic, from the US and abroad), only 8% teach only the business plan.
For instructors and course coordinators who still teach the business plan:
Requirements that business plans be taught because they are seen as a standard entrepreneurial practice should be reconsidered.
While some instructors see benefits in teaching business plans, and they may be important to teach in some circumstances, they are taught by a minority of instructors both inside and outside academia and should no longer be considered the de facto standard for describing businesses.
What Entrepreneurship Tools Do Teachers Use?
“Canvases” (Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas, and/or Value Proposition Canvas) have replaced the business plan as the most popular teaching tool.
As we mentioned earlier, 88% of instructors we surveyed teach with some version of a Canvas, and 50% teach the Business Model Canvas.
Why Do Teachers Love the Canvas?
Our respondents cited many reasons for preferring the Business Model Canvas. The most common reasons are:
It is simple and user friendly. Specifically, some teachers noted the BMC is a way to engage non-business students that is not intimidating.
It forces students to focus on customer development and experimentation as they pursue product-market fit.
It is the dominant tool used in “the real world.”
Because of the dominance of the BMC in entrepreneurship education, we engaged Dr. Alexander Osterwalder in a series of posts to share how he teaches this tool.
How Do The Entrepreneurship Tools You Use Compare To Your Peers?
Nearly 80% of K-12 teachers reported using a canvas tool to teach entrepreneurship, while almost 50% reported using a business plan.
Nearly 90% of academic teachers reported using a canvas tool to teach entrepreneurship, while almost 50% reported using a business plan.
Nearly 90% of US-based teachers reported using a canvas tool to teach entrepreneurship, while almost 50% reported using a business plan.
Other Popular Entrepreneurship Education Tools
AI Tools
To see the full list of additional teaching tools, please enter your email below.
It is not surprising many respondents mentioned AI as a favorite tool. In previous posts, we explored some of the challenges of using AI in academia, and also some benefits. For instance, in a lesson plan we developed, students use ChatGPT as a cofounder and develop a business model and an MVP to test that business model.
Stay tuned for an exciting announcement about our upcoming
Design Thinking
Many respondents mentioned design thinking as a favorite tool. Using this process, students create ideas that are exciting to customers and that they want to pay for because the product actually solves their real problems.
SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) is a technique for evaluating and making choices about an organization, products/services, or specific projects. Founders and small business owners use it to make smart, informed business decisions because it aids in understanding a company’s position within their market or industry and knowing how and where it can grow.
Mindmapping
A mind map is a graphic representation of thoughts, ideas, concepts and notes. This tool allows your students to visually organize information and see relationships among parts of the whole.
Because mind maps offer a visual means to identify connections, it is an excellent tool for idea brainstorming and for competitive analysis. For instance, students can identify similar products/services and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses relative to the student’s product/service.
If you are interested in collaborating on research with this data, please email [email protected] and let us know!
In future posts we will share more about our upcoming TeachingEntrepreneurship.org Summer Summit and about tools and methods to increase student engagement.
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With so many tools out there to teach entrepreneurship . . .
Do you want to know which tools other instructors are using, and why?
We’re sending this survey to our community of 12,000+ entrepreneurship educators to discover which teaching tools are the most popular.
And so that all of us benefit, we’ll be sharing the results of the survey with anyone who completes it.
So if you’d like to know which teaching tools are most popular for entrepreneurship education, just answer these very quick questions (~3 min) and we’ll share what we discover with you.
In upcoming posts, we will share lesson plans, slides, videos, and exercises to engage your students.
Subscribe here to be the first to get these in your inbox.
Missed Our Recent Articles?
Whether you are new to our community of entrepreneurship educators, or you’ve been contributing for years, we wanted to give you a list of the posts our community finds most valuable:
Pilot Your Purpose. This exercise helps students discover what they’re passionate about and see how learning entrepreneurial skills can turn that passion into their purpose.
2022 Top Lesson Plans. Here is the list of our 2022 top entrepreneurship exercises and lesson plans based on feedback from our fast-growing community of thousands of entrepreneurship instructors.
“The best class I’ve taken!” We all want a Dead Poets Society moment in our entrepreneurship class. One professor using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum got hers!
Teaching Customer Interviewing. This card and the online game is a powerful way to teach students the importance of customer interviewing, and the right questions to ask.
Dr. Alex Osterwalder, one of the creators of the Business Model Canvas (BMC), uses a 3-step process to teach it to students. This article outlines his third step:
How to test a business model canvas.
In the first step of his process, Alex introduces students to the different components of the BMC by having them match the business model hypotheses to the appropriate boxes of the canvas. In the second step, Alex helps students learn to write their hypotheses by asking students to complete partially finished BMCs.
In this third step, Alex helps students learn how to use the Business Model Canvas as a tool to prioritize their business models’ riskiest assumptions so they can design tests to validate them.
Prioritization Exercise
It’s critical to teach this prioritization step because it’s one of the major benefits of teaching the BMC over traditional business plans. Once entrepreneurs have a prioritized list of their riskiest assumptions, they can design experiments to test each of those assumptions in order of their prioritized risk.
To introduce prioritization, Alex presents an example from one of Steve Blank‘s classes that you’re welcome to use as well. Steve’s students were working on a company called Ceres, where they wanted to fly drones over farmland to capture images and generate data to help farmers fight drought, disease, and pests.
To help your students visualize what that means in practical terms, you can show them this video:
Step 1: Technical Hypotheses
Show your students the following BMC for Ceres and ask them to brainstorm what technological challenges have to be addressed for the business model to work.
Your students might share similar thoughts as Steve’s students had, such as:
Demonstrate they can build drones
Develop software to extract data from images the drones collect
Present data to farmers in a way they could use it
As with the previous exercises in this series, we recommend using the Think. Pair. Share. technique where students first reflect on the question individually, then share their thoughts with a partner, and finally, you facilitate a discussion with the entire class. This approach enables a lot more interaction and discussion than immediately starting with a class-wide discussion.
Step 2: Business Hypotheses
Next up, have your students brainstorm the non-technical challenges Ceres will have to tackle for their business model to be successful.
Your students may come up with challenges like:
Farmers want data to treat their fields
Farmers want to forecast their production
Farmers have a budget for our value proposition
Farmers are willing to pay for data
Farmers struggle with diseases and drought
Local water utilities and fertilizer/pesticide producers are interested in partnering
Step 3: Prioritizing Hypotheses
Now ask “which of these hypotheses should Ceres test first?” In other words, when there are so many assumptions about a business model, how do you prioritize which ones to test first?
Ask your students which 3 of the 9 hypotheses listed above would they test first. This is another great opportunity to utilize the Think. Pair. Share. technique.
After sharing, tell students that when we talk about the riskiest hypothesis of a business model, we say…
The riskiest assumption of a business model is the one that is most likely to kill the business.
With that in mind, it might make sense that the Ceres students chose the following as their riskiest assumptions:
Demonstrate they can build drones
Develop software to extract data from images the drones collect
Present data to farmers in a way they could use it
You could imagine the Ceres students saying, “Without drones and the data they collect, we have no business!” What they and most entrepreneurs don’t realize is, as Alex puts it, “Desirability” hypotheses are almost universally riskier than “Feasibility” hypotheses.
It turns out that “Feasibility” hypotheses (i.e., “Can we build it?”) are nowhere near as difficult to validate as “Desirability” hypotheses. That’s because…
A problem without a solution is a matter of time. A solution without a problem is a waste of time.
Put another way, if you find out someone has a problem, there are a myriad of ways you can try and solve that problem. But, if you have a solution to a problem, but no one actually has or cares about solving that problem, the solution is useless and all the time spent building it was wasted.
So Ceres’ riskiest assumption isn’t that they can build a drone; their riskiest assumption is that farmers have problems that can be solved with drones.
Their actual riskiest assumptions all fall under the “Desirability” category:
Farmers struggle with diseases and drought
Farmers are willing to pay for data
Local water utilities and fertilizer/pesticide producers are interested in partnering
Once the desirability and viability hypotheses have been validated, the riskiest assumptions fall within the feasibility category.
To demonstrate this point, tell your students about the…
Step 4: Ceres Case Study Update
What happened, in reality, is that Ceres students started interviewing farmers, and farmers asked:
Why would you build drones to take pictures when we already fly planes over our fields to spray for fertilizers and pesticides?
Farmers told students they could just attach a camera to the planes that are already flying over the fields to capture images. If students had built their drones first and talked to customers second, they would have invested millions of dollars building unnecessary technology.
Instead, because the Ceres team validated their desirability hypotheses before their feasibility hypotheses, they were able to simplify their business model and lower costs for themselves and their customers by eliminating the need for developing drones entirely.
As a result, the Ceres team was able to scale its business model to secure significant funding and recognition for its innovativeness.
The lesson for your students:
Always test desirability before feasibility.
Step 5: Homework
At this point, students have experience with the Business Model Canvas that they’re ready to apply what they’ve learned.
For homework, assign students to fill in the BMC for a venture they’d like to validate, as well as identify the 3 riskiest hypotheses of their business model.
The Business Model Canvas and variations of it (e.g. Lean Canvas, Mission Model Canvas, etc.) are some of the most popular and ubiquitous tools in use. Dr. Alex Osterwalder’s use of matching, fill-in-the-blank, and prioritization exercises is intentional, and helps educators avoid some of the common pitfalls when teaching the BMC, namely:
disengaging learners with lectured-based instruction,
overwhelming learners with insufficient structure, and
not adequately addressing how to use the BMC as a hypothesis prioritization and validation tool
In this 3-article series, we shared the steps Alex uses to teach this important tool for entrepreneurship educators.
In the first step, Alex introduces students to the different components of the BMC by having them match the business model hypotheses to the appropriate boxes of the canvas.
In the second step, Alex helps students learn to write their hypotheses by asking students to complete partially finished BMCs.
In this third step, Alex helps students learn how to use the BMC to prioritize the riskiest assumptions so they can design tests to validate them.
Want More from Dr. Osterwalder?
If you like this exercise, Alex also has two new books that are great resources for the classroom:
If you’d like to see Alex teach the Business Model Canvas himself, just enter your email below to watch his full workshop on Teaching the BMC:
Get the Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 3 Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 3” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.
It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers so share it with another instructor you know.
What’s Next?
In upcoming posts, we will share more exercises to engage your students and more tips and tricks to improve your evaluations.
Subscribe here to be the first to get these in your inbox.
Missed Our Recent Articles?
Whether you are new to our community of entrepreneurship educators, or you’ve been contributing for years, we wanted to give you a list of the posts our community finds most valuable:
Prototyping and Pitching. Storytelling is an important entrepreneurship skill. In this experiential exercise, students learn they must inspire others to take action.
Financial Modeling Showdown. If your students get overwhelmed by financial modeling, try this exercise that combines a competitive game with real-world financial modeling tools.
Improve Student Evaluations and Outcomes. Journaling can transform your students’ experience in your classroom. And can be a great way to get quality feedback on whether you’re an effective educator.
“The best class I’ve taken!” We all want a Dead Poets Society moment in our entrepreneurship class. One professor using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum got hers!
Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 2 – Apply
Dr. Alex Osterwalder, one of the creators of the Business Model Canvas (BMC) uses a 3-step process to teach it to students. The article outlines his second step:
Fill-in-the-blank exercises to help students develop their own hypotheses.
In the first step of his process, Alex introduces students to the different components of the BMC by having them match the business model hypotheses to the appropriate boxes of the canvas. In this second step, Alex helps students learn to write their hypotheses by asking students to complete partially finished BMCs.
Fill-in-the-Blank BMCs
In this exercise, you’ll give students some of the business model components for well-known companies and ask them to fill in the rest.
Alex uses fill-in-the-blank exercises intentionally. By providing students with some components of the BMC and asking them to write in the rest, students are able to start practicing using the BMC without the risk of them getting overwhelmed.
He repeats this process several times for different companies, each time providing students fewer components filled in until ultimately, students are completing the canvas entirely on their own.
Like in the first exercise, we recommend using a Think. Pair. Share. model with this lesson to make this activity more interactive and engaging. Details on how to complete all of the above are below.
Step 1: Think
Show students this Dollar Shave Club commercial:
Next, you’ll ask your students to fill in a BMC for the Dollar Shave Club, but you’ll want to give them a couple of hints first. Tell your students that Dollar Shave Club:
Started selling online, with no physical stores
They acquired customers through viral videos
And that these two approaches were novel at the time and instrumental to their success
Give your students this partially filled out BMC for Dollar Shave Club’s business model (link to the worksheets are in the lesson plan below). Give students a few minutes to individually fill in their assumptions for the following boxes:
Channel
Revenue Streams
Step 2: Pair
Next, ask students to pair up (or create breakout rooms for virtual students), and compare their answers. If there’s anything they disagree on, ask them to try to discuss and come to a consensus.
Note: this is an important part of the Think. Pair. Share. process. Talking with a peer helps them organize their thoughts better and practice vocalizing them. If your students are reluctant to speak in class, pairing students up like this before asking for a class-wide discussion can help inspire more interaction.
Step 3: Share
Finally, reconvene the class and ask students to share the assumptions they filled in. Progress around the room asking for students’ assumptions for the Channel, Revenue Streams boxes, and discuss any discrepancies or disagreements.
Start filling in the boxes:
The first Channel you gave them – online store. The second Channel is viral videos (Youtube).
The Revenue Stream is a customized subscription.
Step 4: Second Think-Pair-Share
This is a good opportunity to point out to students that they cannot utilize the channel that provided lots of visibility (YouTube) without incurring significant costs. In the case of Dollar Shave Club, replacing traditional marketing with viral videos requires costly activities & resources. Give students a few minutes to individually fill in their assumptions for the following boxes:
Cost Structure
Key Activities
Key Resources
Key Partners
Next, ask students to pair up and compare their answers. If there’s anything they disagree on, ask them to try to discuss and come to a consensus. Finally, reconvene the class and ask students to share the assumptions they filled in. Progress around the room asking for students’ assumptions for the Key Activities, Key Resources, and Cost Structure boxes, and discuss any discrepancies or disagreements.
Start filling in the boxes:
Key Activities are viral videos.
Key Resources are an e-commerce store and a brand.
Costs are for viral videos and marketing.
Key Partners are manufacturers and e-commerce platform providers.
Using viral videos is Dollar Shave Club’s way to keep the online store flowing with customers.
Fill-in-the-Blank Exercise: B2B
For a B2B business model canvas, we suggest using Salesforce. Provide students the following context:
Salesforce was founded with the goal of “making enterprise software as easy to use as a website like amazon.com.” They pioneered the software-as-a-service (Saas) model for customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and was visionary in predicting the potential of online software.
Step 5: Revenue & Relationships
Repeat the Think. Pair. Share. process from above, this time with a partially-completed BMC worksheet (links to worksheets are in the lesson plan below) asking students to fill in the following boxes for Salesforce:
Revenue Streams
Customer Relationship
Step 6: Complete the Canvas
Repeating the same process as before, ask students to complete the rest of Salesforce’s BMC:
Step 7: Design Your Own Canvas
By this point, your students will have completed several BMCs and they’ll be ready to start creating their own. Using the included BMC template in the worksheets (linked in the lesson plan), ask your students to individually start designing the business model for the company they want to create.
Step 8: Get Feedback
After filling in their canvas, ask students to share their business model’s design with one other student in the class and see if that person has any feedback (i.e., did the designer use each of the boxes appropriately?). Then switch roles so both students get a chance to present and get feedback.
Next Exercise: Prioritization
The BMC is great for helping students develop their business model hypotheses, but that’s only half the value of the tool. The other half is…
Using the Business Model Canvas to test your hypotheses.
In our next article, we will outline a lesson plan for Alex uses to demonstrate how the BMC helps entrepreneurs prioritize their business models’ riskiest assumptions.
It’s critical to teach this step because it’s one of the major benefits of teaching the BMC over traditional business plans. Once entrepreneurs have a prioritized list of riskiest assumptions, they can design experiments to test each of those assumptions and validate their business model!
Want More from Dr. Osterwalder?
If you like this exercise, Alex also has two new books that are great resources for the classroom:
If you’d like to see Alex teach the Business Model Canvas himself, just enter your email below to watch his full workshop on Teaching the BMC:
Get the Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 2 Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 2” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.
It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers so share it with another instructor you know.
What’s Next?
In part 3 of this series, we explain how Dr. Osterwalder uses the BMC to teach students how to prioritize their business models’ riskiest assumptions.
Subscribe here to be the first to get this in your inbox.
Missed Our Recent Articles?
Whether you are new to our community of entrepreneurship educators, or you’ve been contributing for years, we wanted to give you a list of the posts our community finds most valuable:
Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 1. Check out the first post in this series, where we learn Dr. Osterwalder’s process of using matching to help students understand the Business Model Canvas.
How to Improve Student Outcomes & Evaluations. Journaling can transform your students’ experience in your classroom. And can be a great way to get quality feedback on whether you’re an effective educator
“The best class I’ve taken!” We all want a Dead Poets Society moment in our entrepreneurship class. One professor using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum got hers!
Teaching Customer Interviewing. This card and the online game is a powerful way to teach students the importance of customer interviewing, and the right questions to ask.
Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 1 – Intro
When we ran a workshop with Dr. Alex Osterwalder about how he teaches his Business Model Canvas, attendees were so excited about what he was sharing, 98% of them voted to change our schedule on the fly and extend his session from 60 to 90 minutes.
The exercises he was sharing were too engaging to let him stop.
In this article, the first in a 3-part series, we’ll structure Osterwalder’s exercises into easy-to-implement lesson plans you can use with your students.
Exercise #1: Business Model Matching
To introduce students to the 9 components of the BMC, Dr. Osterwalder starts by giving students a set of business model hypotheses and asking them to place each one in the appropriate box of the BMC.
Prepping Before Class
To make the most efficient use of class time, assign students to watch these videos before class:
Then you’ll want to print out the worksheets linked in the lesson plan below. Digital worksheets are also in the lesson plan if you’re teaching remotely.
Step 1: Fill the Boxes
Alex uses Airbnb in his first exercise because:
Students are familiar with Airbnb
As a two-sided marketplace, Airbnb is a great example of how one business model may need to fulfill the needs of multiple customer segments to be successful
Starting with the “Airbnb BMC: Travelers” worksheet, ask students to write each of the provided business model hypotheses in their appropriate boxes:
Copies of this worksheet are available in the lesson plan below.
We recommend each student complete this individually. While students will work in pairs for the next step, to help increase engagement and discussion, we like using Think. Pair. Share. with this type of exercise, which starts by having students work on their own.
Step 2: Pair
Next, ask students to pair up (if necessary, create breakout rooms for virtual students), and compare their answers. If there’s anything they disagree on, ask them to try to discuss and come to a consensus.
Note: this is an important part of the Think. Pair. Share. process. Talking with a peer helps them organize their thoughts better and practice vocalizing them. If your students are reluctant to speak in class, pairing students up like this before asking for a class-wide discussion can help inspire more interaction.
Step 3: Share
Reconvene the class. Go one by one through the boxes and ask a pair to share what they wrote for a particular box. Go through each of the boxes in this order:
Customer Segments
Value Proposition
Channels
Customer Relationship
Revenue Streams
Cost Structure
Key Activities
Key Resources
Key Partners
Ask a new pair to report out what they wrote for each box and then ask the rest of the class if they had anything else different for that box. If student pairs disagree on what should be in a particular box, use that as an opportunity to increase discussion and, before you reveal the correct answer, have your students vote on which answer they think will be right.
Slides with the correct answers, like the one above, are available in the lesson plan below.
Step 4: Repeat with Airbnb Hosts
Now ask students to fill out the AirBnB BMC: Hosts worksheet using the same Think-Pair-Share technique.
Take time to explain that many businesses don’t have just one business model as a part of their success. Instead, many businesses, like Airbnb, are a multi-sided market. In this business model, the needs of two parties must be met.
You can highlight the popularity of this business model by pointing out that Uber, Doordash, Amazon all have this multi-sided market where the business has to keep multiple customers happy.
Summary & Next Steps
Alex prefers simple matching exercises like these as a quick way to introduce the BMC. For more details on how to use it, including worksheets and slides, check out the free lesson plan below.
Next up, Alex provides students with BMCs that are partially filled out and asks students to fill in the rest – which we’ll detail in the next article in this series! We’ll share two more steps in the process Dr. Osterwalder uses to teach the business model canvas:
How to use fill in the blank exercises to help students create their own canvases
How to use prioritization exercises to teach how to use the BMC to test business model assumptions
Want More from Dr. Osterwalder?
If you like this exercise, Alex also has two new books that are great resources for the classroom:
If you’d like to see Alex teach the Business Model Canvas himself, just enter your email below to watch his full workshop on Teaching the BMC:
Get the Teaching the Business Model Canvas Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Teaching the Business Model Canvas: Part 1” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.
It’s free for any/all entrepreneurship teachers so share it with another instructor you know.
Read Part 2 In This Series of Teaching the Business Model Canvas
Check out the second post in this series, focused on using a fill-in-the-blank exercise to help students develop their own hypotheses.
What’s Next?
In upcoming posts, we will share two more steps in the process Dr. Osterwalder uses to teach the business model canvas.
Subscribe here to be the first to get these in your inbox.
Missed Our Recent Articles?
Whether you are new to our community of entrepreneurship educators, or you’ve been contributing for years, we wanted to give you a list of the posts our community finds most valuable:
Improving Your (Inherited) Course. Inheriting an entrepreneurship course presents many challenges. Re-design the course and provide engaging experiences with this curriculum.
How to Improve Student Outcomes & Evaluations. Journaling can transform your students’ experience in your classroom. And can be a great way to get quality feedback on whether you’re an effective educator
“The best class I’ve taken!” We all want a Dead Poets Society moment in our entrepreneurship class. One professor using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum got hers!
Teaching Customer Interviewing. This card and the online game is a powerful way to teach students the importance of customer interviewing, and the right questions to ask.
